Teacher pay threatens student achievement, expert testifies

From the Houston Chronicle:

Texas teacher salaries are not competitive, and teaching quality has declined, which threatens student achievement, a Harvard-trained economist testified Tuesday in an ongoing school funding lawsuit trial.

Duke University professor Jacob Vigdor contends that Texas does not pay its public school teachers enough and believes a decline in the competitive job market for teachers hampers the state's ability to recruit and retain highly affective ones.

And

"Firing the bottom 5 percent on an annual basis means recruiting 15,000 extra teachers per year to replace them. This is on top of the roughly 40,000 teachers that you need to hire just to keep up with population growth and regular attrition," Vigdor testified.

More here.

So Texas already has a teacher shortage, and is refusing to do what it needs to do in order to recruit more teachers.  Meanwhile, conservatives are pushing the concept of getting rid of  "bad teachers," who are determined, no doubt, by the standardized test scores of their students, which fluctuate wildly from year to year, and from social class to social class, and are dependent on countless factors that are outside teachers' influence, rendering the entire concept of "bad" highly problematic.  Adding insult to injury, Texas is unwilling to attract high quality teachers by paying them like the professionals they are.  Student learning necessarily suffers.

The only conclusion one can make is that Texas, along with most of the rest of the country, is simply not serious about education.  Of course, anybody who's been paying attention already knew that.

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